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In the middle of October, Mel and I spent a week in Iceland. We flew from Gatwick, which in itself turned out to be an interesting flight. We flew the length of the UK, over clear skies, exiting over Skye and the Outer Hebrides. Looking down as we flew over Glasgow at an altitude of 11Km really gave a sense of how narrow the country gets that far north. Looking out of the windows on the right we could see down the Forth and to the North Sea, from the windows on the left was a view over the Atlantic.

We arrived in Keflavik in the rain in the middle of the afternoon, and after picking up our checked bag and getting the hire car, we needed to do a bit of shopping – food and fuel for our camping stoves. I had done some research before we set off and it seemed that gas cartridges and bottles of Coleman fuel were available from all petrol stations. Unfortunately the petrol station we tried didn’t have either. Luckily we did spot a bottle of “lampa olía” (kerosene), which would do at a pinch. As it turned out, we needn’t have worried, because the Grindavik camp site had a large cupboard full of half-full gas cartridges available for free to campers.

We had an absolutely lovely meal of Arctic char with lobster sauce at a restaurant called Ráin and then headed off on a slightly scary, but uneventful drive to Grindavik. One day we will learn that waiting until its dark before having our first experience driving in a foreign country isn’t good for the nerves!

Sunday

We woke up on Sunday morning in Grindavik campsite and packed away before heading off to Geysir. On the way, we happened across the volcanic crater at Kerið, which is believed to have formed when the surface rock collapsed into the volcano’s empty magma chamber. There is an opaque lake at the bottom of the crater and lots of very tame redwings!

At Geysir, there are a few gift shops and ample parking. We walked around the bubbling hot springs with streams of warm water running across the ground. A bit further on was the Strokkur geyser, which erupts every 5-10 minutes. After each big 20 metre high jet of hot water erupts, it flows across the path, depositing a layer of minerals. There were a few big mineral encrusted hot springs boiling away further up the hill, and we continued up beyond the springs to get a good look over the whole area.

Originally we had planned to camp in Hveravellir, in the highlands, and our research had suggested that the road (F35) usually closed for the winter in late October. But the roads had already been closed for a few weeks due to snow fall, so we instead camped at Sjkól, just a few minutes up the road from Geysir.

After pitching the tent, we paid an evening visit to the Gullfoss waterfall; an enormous staircase of waterfalls. The path had a “crampons recommended” sign on it, which everyone was ignoring. We didn’t find any ice on the path, but the spray from the falls was forming hoar frost on the banks of the river.

Back to the camp site and as we were cooking dinner Mel thought she could see a blue-green glow in the sky, and once it had gone properly dark, the Aurora Borealis was clearly dancing across the sky. The lights were quite bright and making fairly rapidly moving patterns across the whole sky.

The night was still and cold, and the ground frozen. Although we had thermal underwear and down sleeping bags, we relit the stove, boiled water and filled up hot water bottles before heading to bed.

Monday

We had a reasonable night’s sleep, although my self inflating mat had sprung a leak. We had been sleeping on ⅔rd length self inflating mats on top of full length closed cell foam, but I was left effectively just sleeping on only the closed cell foam – uncomfortable. Although I duck-taped the leak, I never managed to properly seal it.

The temperature in the morning was low enough that the remaining milk had frozen in our breakfast cereal bowls by the time we’d finished our cups of tea.

We headed off to Þingvellir, the site of the early Icelandic parliament. Þingvellir is a rift valley, with the North American continental plate on the west side and Eurasia on the east. The plates are drifting apart at a rate of about 2cm each year, and as we walked to Sgógarhóll the path crossed a number of deep water filled chasms which had obviously opened as a result of the continental drift. We followed a ptarmigan along the path before it flew off, before reaching Sgógarhóll, which was basically just a junction of several paths in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to walk further.

We finished off the day with a dip in the Secret Lagoon hot spring at Fluðir, before heading back to the tent to cook. The Secret Lagoon isn’t especially secret, and costs about £20 each to get in (actually, about £16 for us since Sjkól camp site gave us a 20% off voucher). It is a purpose built swimming pool with stone sides and a gravel floor, and is fed from some small, but very hot, springs immediately next to it. You have to be a bit careful because the water is indeed very hot where it enters the pool.

Although we were later told the Aurora had made another appearance, it was overcast at Sjkól, so there was nothing for us to see.

Tuesday

Having been unable to camp in the highlands due to the road closures, we decided to drive as far into the highlands as we could for a fairly long walk. The roads were actually fairly clear, which left us thinking that the authorities were possibly a little overzealous with the closures. If we had been in the UK we may well have ignored the closure and carried on. Superjeeps – big four wheel drive cars with massive tyres, and even special buses with huge tyres whizzed past occasionally, but we parked where the F35 becomes a gravel road and set off along a bridle path.

It was a beautiful sunny day with a stiff cold breeze and a couple of centimetres of snow on the ground. The breeze dropped off as we dropped down from the road and it was a pleasant walk. We were in the middle of the countryside surrounded by snow covered mountains on all sides, and I couldn’t help but think that I would love to do a multi-day ski touring expedition across the mountains – although Mel said I was nuts when I suggested it!

Unfortunately we hadn’t gone too far before finding an unbridged river that we needed to cross. Mel wasn’t keen on taking her boots off and wading across a glacial river, so we walked up-stream a bit but couldn’t find a better place to cross. In the end I waded across in bare feet, dropped all my gear off on the far bank before returning and carrying Mel across.

Continuing on we found canine tracks in the snow – maybe a wolf, and signs of an obvious scuffle between it and a bird as it caught dinner. Then we found another, slightly larger, river to cross and we started to realise there would be more river crossings than was apparent from the map.

Not wanting to continually take our boots off to ford rivers, we decided to cut our losses and head back to the car. We finished the day with a short amble though some tracks at Geysir to the small Haukadalskirkja church.

Wednesday

We woke up to find that a thaw had set in and the weather had turned quite wet. It turned out that, when not frozen, the bit of ground we had pitched the tent on was a puddle! We lazily packed the sopping wet tent away before heading to Reykjadalur. By the time we got there the weather had dried up and the sun had come out. There’s about a 50 minute walk past bubbling, boiling hot springs before arriving at a thermal river. The river isn’t very deep, but small weirs have been built out of stones so that it has pools which are deep enough to lie down in. There are board-walks along the river banks and although there are no changing facilities there are a couple of wooden wind breaks. In the cold air, we changed into our swimsuits and hurried into the water, which was just the right temperature for floating around in whilst watching the snow covered peaks around us.

As nice as the Secret Lagoon was, I think the Rekyjadalur thermal river was a far nicer environment to relax in, and not just because it was free!

After floating around in the water for an hour or so, we headed back to the car and continued our drive back to Grindavik. By the time we got there, the weather had deteriorated and it was very windy. We had a table booked in the restaurant at the Blue Lagoon thermal baths, so we headed off there and had a meal – nice, but no where near as nice as the (less expensive) meal we had had on the first night in Keflavik. The Blue Lagoon itself was very nice and we spent about an hour and a half floating around in it’s cloudy waters – its expensive, but worth doing once at least. They have a bar actually in the pool to buy drinks from, which is a bit of a gimmick and I found that after I’d got my drink I was left trying to figure out how to carry on floating about without dropping it in the water!

The wind in Grindavik was still raging and we were woken up a few times through the night as big gusts of wind flattened our poor little dome tent.

Thursday

The Grindavik camp site has an indoor, heated common room with cooking facilities, which is open between about 08:00 and 22:00 every day. The wind was still howling, so we took advantage of these facilities and had our breakfast in the common room.

We left for a day in Reykavik, half expecting our tent to have blown away by the evening. I’m not really a city person and I must say I wasn’t terribly impressed with Reykavik – the shops weren’t much of interest and we couldn’t find anywhere decent to have lunch. There were restaurants if you wanted a big (and expensive) dinner, but there didn’t seem to be much in the way of little cafés doing light food, sandwiches, etc.

We did find the Volcano House quite interesting though. They have a couple of short films, one about the eruption on Vestmannæyjar in 1973, and another on the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010. There’s also a display of various types of rocks.

Thankfully the tent was still just about standing when we returned to Grindavik, and we made use of the common room to cook and eat our dinner. The wind was still absolutely howling, and continued through most of the night.

Friday

Another slightly restless night because of the wind, and we made use of the common room to have our breakfast before packing up the tent. Since we had been using the camp site’s cooking facilities instead of our own stove for the past couple of nights, we had about 300ml of kerosene left over, which I left in the “free fuel” cupboard at the camp site for someone else to make use of.

This was going to be a bit of a lazy day, and we headed up to the lighthouse at Garðskagaviti, just north of Keflavik. Then headed down to the Viking World museum, which was extremely interesting, documenting the movements of the Vikings into Iceland, and then on to Greenland and North America. They also have a reproduction Viking ship, the Íslendingur, that you can climb onto. The ship was sailed from Iceland to North America in 2000, retracing the original Viking voyage.

Finally, we checked into our accommodation and returned the car. For the final night of the trip, we stayed in a self contained studio apartment, which was actually a converted garage. It was within walking distance of both the car hire place and Keflavik airport.

Saturday

Saturday was a very early start – up at 04:00 and out of the door at 04:30 for a walk from the outskirts of Keflavik to the airport. As we took off, we were greeted by the most magnificent sunrise and watched as it illuminated the Blue Lagoon and Grindavik far below us.

Lessons Learnt

The tent is old, and the groundsheet wasn’t as waterproof as it should be. After the ground thawed out on Wednesday we ended up with quite a bit of water in the tent. This wasn’t a big problem as we made sure everything in the tent was in dry bags and our sleeping bags were in bivvy bags.

Our tent isn’t very good in high winds. At least it doesn’t break, but it ends up being flattened by the big gusts.

It is a real pain to prime my stove (Primus Omnifuel II) using kerosene in subzero temperatures. I couldn’t light the priming pad with a butane lighter and found that it was best to put a tiny piece of cotton wool in the stove’s burner bell, soak it with kerosene and light that. Even so you need to give it a lot of heat with a lighter to get it to catch light. Ordinarily, I carry a small bottle of alcohol with the stove, which I use for priming if I’m stuck burning kerosene, but I couldn’t carry that on the plane. Maybe priming paste is a good option if you can get away with carrying it on the plane.

We had taken an MSR Pocket Rocket stove as a light weight backup, but trying to run it off half-full gas cartridges picked up from Grindavik camp site was a complete failure in subzero temperatures.

Butane lighters are useless in the cold. I had planned for this and kept a lighter in a money belt under my clothes, or inside my sleeping bag, at all times to keep it warm. That seemed to work very well.

A smaller fuel bottle is available for my Primus stove, and would probably have been useful to reduce its size in our luggage.